


a skeleton of something more

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [68]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Blood and Injury, Broken Bones, Cabin Fic, M/M, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-08 00:14:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20984786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: “John?” he murmurs, still coasting on the pain. His head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, if cotton were also made of glass.The body at his back stirs, and he feels lips on the back of his neck, dragging against his skin as they part on a shaky sigh. Then, he hears John whisper, “Oh, thank god. You’re alive.”





	a skeleton of something more

**Author's Note:**

> Day 10 of October. Prompts of the day were: stitches, snowstorm, basement, disaster, go it alone, lightning clouds, and broken. Fun fact: I know this trope was super popular years and years ago (for example, I remember at least six Inuyasha fics with the whole 'stuck in a snowstorm and now we have to cuddle for warmth' schtick) but I don't think I have ever officially written one myself.
> 
> One of the prompts was snowstorms, okay, I couldn't help myself.

The storm comes out of nowhere. One minute they’re boots on the ground, Teyla and Ronon at their backs cracking jokes about what happened in the mess hall earlier, and the next Teyla and Ronon are lost to the blinding whip of gusting snow and he’s got John’s fingers hooked into his vest, shouting something that Rodney can’t hear over the shrieking of the wind.

The most that they could figure about this world was that it was inhabited once, and then something wiped them all out, leaving sprawling untouched ghost towns like tiny, pristine snow globes. They hadn't known what wiped the inhabitants out - if they'd fled through the stargate from the wraith or if some mass extinction event was responsible - just that the people were gone.

Guess now they knew the reason.

The storm is worse than anything that Rodney's ever experienced. Worse than winters in Canada when he was a boy, worse than Antarctica, worse than that one world that O’Neill and Carter got stuck on back in the glory days of SG-1.

The chill seeps into his bones in seconds. It feels like shards of glass are being crammed down his throat every time he takes a breath and he has to squint his eyes mostly closed, because if he leaves them open for too long they start to feel like they're icing over, freezing from the inside out, his tear ducts freezing shut the moment his eyes begin to stream. Pulling them open again tears out his eyelashes where they’re clumped frozen together. He doesn’t know how John keeps moving, trudging through the thigh high snow, hauling Rodney along like baggage.

Lightning flashes above them, briefly turning the snow around them purple. He sees it fork through the sky before he has to close his eyes again. He can't remember a time that he's ever seen lightning and snow together. It was rare back on Earth, he thinks, a Midwest phenomena that occasionally happened near the Great Lakes.

They won’t survive in this if they don’t find shelter. Ten minutes feels like lifetimes. Rodney can’t feel the tips of his fingers, can’t feel his feet. It’s a wet snow, covering them in a slurry that still manages to feel like needles on their skin.

He wasn’t expecting the cliff face, and knows that John wasn’t either, because John doesn’t even have enough time to flinch before they’re going over the edge.

It isn’t a sheer drop, but it’s as good as. They fall, and then they roll, hitting trees hard on their way down, knocking the air from their lungs. Rodney chokes and sputters on mouthful after mouthful of wet snow, and somewhere between the initial drop and the bottom, he hits a tree the wrong way - feels the bone of his leg snap like brittle glass.

He lies dazed at the bottom afterwards, half in and out of consciousness, and waits for death. His body aches, and he feels blood dripping down his brow and knows that he struck it against something too. He doesn't remember that part.

He isn’t cold anymore though.

It’s minutes, or maybe hours before he feels a hand against his shoulder, prodding first, and then when that doesn’t work, _dragging_.

“Go ‘way,” he thinks he murmurs, and the last thing that he sees before the black sucks him under is the broad expanse of John’s back and something large and dark looming before them. Then he’s gone.

* * *

When he wakes up, the first thing that he notices is the pain. It’s _everywhere_ \- the bruised feeling tips of his fingers, his toes, the line of his back, his hips. But mostly, he feels it in his head and leg.

The second thing that he notices is that he’s naked.

He floats towards that awareness on a cloud of pain and distant endorphins. It doesn't bother him as much as it ought to. 

The third thing that he notices is the body pressed up against him, tucked around his back like a barnacle, arms clamped down around his, foreign hands stuffed into his armpits. He feels breath on the back of his neck.

“John?” he murmurs, still coasting on the pain. His head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, if cotton were also made of glass.

The body at his back stirs, and he feels lips on the back of his neck, dragging against his skin as they part on a shaky sigh. Then, he hears John whisper, “Oh, thank god. You’re alive.”

“Didn’t expect that, really,” Rodney tells him dreamily. He pauses, brain struggling to form articulate thoughts. “Ronon and Teyla?”

He feels John shake his head, a tuft of his hair tickling Rodney’s cheek. “Not here.”

“God,” Rodney says, the horror of it washing over them. “I hope they…”

John nods. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Never seen a storm like that.” Rodney says, and shifts experimentally. He stops moving_ immediately_, groaning in pain when what feels like red hot pokers begin to assault his leg. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” John says, sounding tired. “_Fuck_.”

“Is it-”

“It’s broken, yeah. I splinted it the best I could, but most of the wood in the fireplace was rotting, and I had to use a lot of it to make the fire."

For the first time, Rodney realizes that there’s a small fire crackling in a hearth a few feet to their right. He hadn’t felt the warmth, and the flame is small, but he should have at least seen the light.

“You’re also probably concussed,” John adds, and Rodney snorts.

“What about you?” he asks, huddling back into John’s warmth when an icy breeze hits him out of nowhere. Probably from the chimney.

John is quiet behind him.

“John?”

“I’ll survive,” John eventually says, but his voice has that half-familiar tilt to it that means he’s lying about something that he thinks Rodney’s better off not knowing. It’s the voice he uses when he tells Rodney that he’s not cheating at chess or that those asshole villagers _definitely_ shot themselves.

“John,” he says, chiding, and attempts to turn over.

It hurts. His leg is all but useless and his head spins when he moves too quickly, but eventually, he’s got himself sorted out, half turned in towards John’s chest, half on his back. It isn’t particularly comfortable, but it does allow him a glimpse of John, who is carefully not meeting his eyes, a stubborn jut to his jaw.

John, he realizes, is also naked.

It would be more shocking if it weren’t for the matted blood slicking the entire left side of John’s face, the possibly broken but definitely bloody nose, and the huge gash that stretches across John’s shoulder and continues, jagged and still weeping red, down into the meat of his bicep.

“Jesus Christ,” he hisses, and jerks his eyes up to John’s. “Screw my leg, we need to do something about_ that._”

He gestures with his chin, and John’s jaw tightens, his lips thinning unhappily.

“You were concussed, unconscious, and we were both hypothermic. I prioritized.”

“Well, I’m awake now,” Rodney snaps, and tries to sit up. The room tilts alarmingly, and the corners of his vision goes dark, but he manages it. Dark spots scatter around the room, flitting back and forth like flies, but after a few seconds, they begin to blip out, one by one. “Did you find anything we can use to stitch that up?”

“No,” John tells him. Then admits, “But I didn’t look too hard either. I didn't see much of the first floor. We’re in the basement - it seems to be where the locals camped out during storms like these. ”

He’s staring at something in the corner and Rodney turns, his eyes adjusting slowly to the dim lighting. There’s a cot, heaped with blankets, and he has just enough time to wonder why John didn’t grab them to add to their pile before he realizes what he’s looking at.

It’s clear that the corpses have been there for a very, _very_ long time. The temperature has kept them largely preserved, but their flesh is black and mold clings to the flesh in white, frosty looking patches, their faces dried and pulled into gaunt, nightmarish caricatures of themselves. It’s a hideous scene, and Rodney can’t help but wonder if they died like this, huddled up and waiting out a storm, or if they’d ended it before they could either starve or freeze. He could probably figure it out if he could make himself get closer, but the thought alone is enough to make him gag.

When Rodney turns his attention back to John, there’s a heavy, sober look in his eyes, like maybe he’s wondering if that’s what they’ll look like when someone else stumbles upon their corpses decades down the line.

Rodney makes himself swallow. “Can you stand?”

John seems to consider for a moment, then nods. “I don’t think I hit my head as hard as you did.”

“Think you can find a needle in a haystack?” Rodney asks, an attempt at a smile curling around his lips. In truth, he feels sick. He still hurts, and he’s cold, and all he wants to do is yak up the protein bar he’d crammed into his mouth before they left.

“Think we’ll have better luck using that,” John tells him bleakly, nodding towards the fire, where there's a hot poker sitting in wait, half in and out of the flames.

Rodney really was going to lose his lunch.

“All right,” he agrees, swallowing thickly.

John nods, and before Rodney can protest, pushes himself to his feet.

Rodney tries not to look as John walks by him, keeping his gaze mostly on the worn floorboards beneath him. There would be other times to admire John’s thighs, he tells himself. Times when they weren’t both injured and freezing to death in a dead stranger’s basement.

John sits next to him when he returns, crossing his ankles underneath him. His eyes are grim when he offers Rodney the handle of the poker. Rodney’s hand shakes when he takes it from him.

“This is so unsanitary,” he says, staring at the molten glow of the tip.

John shrugs, wincing when the movement pulls at the wound. Fresh blood wells to the surface. “It’s what we’ve got.”

“Yeah.” Rodney considers the poker for a minute longer, steeling his nerves, and then sighs. “Come here.”

John scoots closer, and this time, Rodney can’t avoid the eyeful of soft dick and powerful thighs that he gets, up close and personal. He closes his eyes. He can’t even take any pleasure from it. Three years he’s wanted to get intimately acquainted with John’s junk, and the one time he catches a glimpse, he couldn’t get hard if he fucking wanted to.

“This is gonna suck,” Rodney warns him, and John just nods tiredly.

He doesn’t scream. His whole body tenses, the muscles of his neck bulging, his eyes clenched tightly shut, fingers gone white around Rodney’s good kneecap. The room fills with the stink of cooking meat, John’s skin sizzling and going red and black beneath the poker. Rodney pulls back, and because the universe hates them, has to lean in and do it again because the gash was too large to get all in one go.

By the time it’s over, John is panting, sweat trickling down his brow.

“That was a little worse than I thought it would be,” he tells Rodney, still doubled over and gasping.

Rodney nods, and tosses the poker back towards the fire. He misses, but the still searing length of metal lands on the hearth rather than the dry wooden floor, so he counts it as a win. It would suck to burn to death in the middle of a raging snowstorm.

“Can we sleep now?” he asks, and it speaks of how exhausted John is that he doesn’t even argue about concussions and needing to stay awake, just nods and slumps to the side. His head lands on Rodney’s flank, and Rodney spends a minute positioning them into a more comfortable position before he closes his eyes and follows John into the dark.

* * *

The next time that he wakes up, the wind is still howling outside and John is tucked neatly against his side, head resting on Rodney’s chest.

He’s warm now, so warm that Rodney worries for a moment, checking his wound for signs of infection before he lets himself relax. He’s a little warm now too, sweat having gathered on their bodies as they slept, making their skin stick together damply wherever they’re touching.

Rodney doesn’t stay awake long. His head still hurts and his leg is even worse now that he’s clearer-headed.

It goes on like that for several days, sleeping and waking in bursts. At some point, John digs out a couple pieces of jerky and Rodney produces the six protein bars that he had on his person, and they eat them together, strictly rationing themselves to only several bites a piece.

There’s not much else to do in this place besides for wait for the storm to pass and try not to die of infection.

It’s on the third day that Rodney wakes from sleep to the press of John’s dick, jutting heavy and hard into his hip. They don’t talk about it, and John spends the rest of the day as far away from Rodney as possible, as if that’ll erase what happened.

When he wakes to much of the same on the fourth morning, and John makes to pull away, Rodney catches hold of his wrist and says, “It’s fine, John. These things happen. It’s just biology.”

John’s lips purse, tightening around the corners. He takes his hand back, gently, and for the rest of the day sits on the hearth, stoking the fire.

Rodney’s been watching their pile of rotten firewood dwindle. On the second night, John had gathered everything flammable that he could from upstairs. It wasn’t much, pieces of furniture, a woven basket, a few books in an unfamiliar, probably long dead language. They’re down to a small jumble of odds and ends, a few broken floorboards, and maybe a piece or two of the original stack.

It isn’t a great sign. It’s cold here all the time, and the flame doesn’t help much, but it’s something. The blankets that John had gotten are all musty and threadbare, worn out, and he’d found a few half-rotted fur cloaks, but even those didn’t help much.

They’re down to their last two protein bars, which can keep them going for another few days if they try, but the situation is dire. Not for the first time, Rodney considers the very real possibility that he may die here.

“John,” he calls, when hours have gone by and John hasn’t moved or said a word. John glances up at him. Rodney beckons. “Come here.”

John hesitates. Rodney can see it in his eyes, the prey-bright shine of an animal too used to running away.

“_John_,” he says.

John comes, staggering over to him. He drops to the floor in front of Rodney, and Rodney reaches out, looping an arm around his waist, and drags him close.

This close, John’s heart is rabbit-quick, his breathing heavy.

Rodney licks his lips, and whispers in John’s ear, “I’m going to try something.”

He slides a hand down between them, and gets his fist wrapped around John’s dick.

John’s breath hitches in his chest, a strange shudder going through him as his dick jumps in Rodney’s hand.

It’s been a long time since Rodney’s given anyone but himself a handy, but it’s like riding a bike. You never really forget how to do it.

John is responsive, squirming, breath coming in pants as Rodney works him in his hand. He murmurs a whole bunch of nonsense words, bitten off chunks of pleas or Rodney’s name. His whole body is strung tight, and when he moans, the sound has a desperate, ragged edge to it. Rodney's always thought that John got around a lot, but now he thinks maybe he was wrong. He wonders how long it’s been since somebody’s touched him like this.

John's hand knocks up against Rodney’s chest when he’s getting close, and he reaches out, grasping for something, some kind of tether, and finally gets a hand wrapped around Rodney’s shoulder right when he comes.

It takes him a minute or so to come down, slanting his eyes open and looking at Rodney, open-mouthed and still panting. There’s a question there, so Rodney shrugs and thinks about using the biology line again before he decides to settle on honesty.

“I wanted to,” he says, and doesn’t say the rest of it - that he’d wanted to do it before they fucking died here. That John was his damn bucket list.

John stares at him for a moment, his dark eyes black in the dull glow of the fire. Then he nods, decisively, and using one hand, shoves Rodney over onto his back, careful of his leg.

Rodney blinks, “What-”

John’s fingers nudge up against his mouth, and bewildered, Rodney sucks them in.

John shivers, and whispers, “Just. Hush.”

And then he crouches between Rodney’s thighs, and lowers his head over his cock.

When it’s over, and John’s lips are puffy and swollen, they lie together in silence. The fire is starting to go out, but neither of them really want to get up and rekindle it, so they let it burn lower and lower.

“Tomorrow I’m going to try and go for help,” John tells him, and Rodney nods wearily.

He’d figured John would say something like that. The worst thing is that he doesn’t even have an argument against it. They won’t survive here, not for much longer, not with the fire and the food gone. He can’t argue that he’ll go with John, because with his leg, he’s a liability. He’d slow them down too much, and in this cold, a difference of only a few minutes would be the difference between life and death.

Rodney's best argument, sadly, is that he doesn’t want to die alone.

“All right,” he murmurs into the quiet, and closes his eyes, pulling John close, until they’re breathing together, pressed as tight as they’ll go.

When he wakes up the next morning, John is gone.

Rodney does all that he can.

He waits.

**Author's Note:**

> My [tumblr](https://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/), if you dare.


End file.
